Oh goodness me, there is a colossal audience out there for movies about sharks. Jaws (1975) does not count in this conversation; Steven Spielberg’s suspenseful masterpiece is in a class of its own, and sits with a rarefied breed of high quality thrillers. I am looking at a growing array of cheap-looking, sensationalistic potboilers made for indiscriminate viewers that care less for character and more for gore. In these films the characters fail to matter. You would never, after all, build much empathy with a tin of fish food.

David R. Ellis’ Shark Night (2011) is a case in point. A group of college students head out to an isolated island cabin in the middle of a saltwater lake, only to find themselves under siege by a variety of aggressive and ill-tempered sharks. Is there an explanation for why the sharks are there? In fact there is, and in context it is a surprisingly funny one – but of course it’s also the case that the context is stupid, so the explanation never really stands a chance. Films like this can succeed with the right degree of humour, and its easy to point to Steve Miner’s charming Lake Placid (1999) for that, but the bottom line for Shark Night is that it is not particularly funny and is never in any fashion charming.

The thing that is particularly galling about it is that for a film packed with crudely presented shark attacks and leering shots of young women in bikinis, there is surprisingly little gore and no nudity. Alexandre Aja – no stranger to extremity with films including High Tension (2003) and the Hills Have Eyes remake (2006) – remade cult film Piranha in 2010 with a tasteless surfeit of blood and nudity and found a viable commercial hit. Shark Night feels like a studio-mandated cash-in, but one prepared for a PG-13 audience. It insinuates trash cinema, but the trash simply does not arrive. I did not enjoy Piranha, but I respected its open intentions.

Shark Night is also bizarrely sloppy. One character is introduced getting a tattoo; a few hours later the tattoo is gone. Another loses an arm and a lot of blood to a bull shark. The injury is so severe they cannot be transported to safety by boat. Shortly afterwards they are fighting a hammerhead one-handed with a stick.

All of this would be acceptable in a low budget production – indeed a lot of people actively seek out this sort of ‘so bad it’s good’ movie and enjoy them a great deal. Shark Night cost an estimated US$25 million. That is real money. The same end result could have been achieved with one-fifth that amount. This is the sort of lazy commercial filmmaking that should not be rewarded. In the software industry they have a term: shovelware, where quantity takes the lead over quality, and useless crap is cynically bundled up to give a false sense of value.

This is shovel cinema.